Title: Assignments
Course: CPS 161: An Intro to Programming with Java - DL MM MASTER

Assignments

Getting started and JH0

- To find out how this course works, you will click on the "Learning Units" button in blackboard and open up the Startup folder. Watch all of the videos in this section.
- Once you have watched all of the videos in this section, you will need to do 2 things.
  - Post a discussion board entry in the "JH0 - Introductions" discussion board. In this entry, you will  say why you are taking this course and what are your future computer programming plans.
  - Take the JH0 Quiz - This quiz covers the information in the Startup Folder.  You can retake this quiz as many times as you want and your best score achieved will be your final score. The purpose of the quiz is to make sure you know the how the class works.

Assignments JH1, JH2, ... JH7:

Learning this subject requires programming practice. There may be some college classes where you can get a good grade without doing very much ... this isn't one of them. To tell you the truth, grading homework is not the most fun thing for instructors, but it is the price that needs to be paid to make sure that the programming concepts are learned.

The real intent on the assignments is to make sure that if you do get a good grade, you should know something about programming in the end.

For each assignment you will create a zip file of all work associated with the assignment. This zip file will be uploaded to blackboard before you submit it. To create the zip file, you will do the following:

- Make sure you do your "Class Participation" ... See the Discussion Board/Class Participation information in the startup folder for details. In short questions can be submitted on the appropriate JH1, JH2, ... JH7 discussion board. Answers to existing questions will show up as replies to existing questions. Sharings will show up as replies to the appropriate entry on the Sharing discussion board (i.e. "JH3 Sharing"). Note that in some cases you might create your "Class Participation" before starting the assignment, and in other cases you might do it after completing the assignment.
- Note that the discussion board name, subject name and posting date should be copied into the provided worksheet.
- Create an Eclipse project with a name that starts with the name of the assignment and ends with your netID. For example: JH3_chasselb.
- Follow the instructions found in the "Assignments and Tests" section of blackboard. If you are new to Java, packages are similar to folders.
- Note that blackboard has a button on the left called "JH... Homework files". Use this linked button to find the Homeword definitions for JH1, JH2, ... JH7. In general each problem in the assignment should show up as a separate package in your project. This link also contains downloadable text worksheets for each assignment.
- Using some Text Editor, fill in the text worksheet associated with this assignment according to the instructions. This may include a copy of the output from your program, a JING of your running program, or whatever is requested in the instructions.
- Once the assignment is complete, you will create an exported zip file with the following instructions:
  - Right-Click on the name of the project and select "Export".
  - In the General folder, select the "Archive File" option. Then click on "Next".
  - Browse to the folder where you want to store your exported zip file. Name your Zip file the same as your Project name containing your Netid. Make sure that the suffix is ".zip". For example a proper name would be JH1_chasselb.zip.
  - Click on "Finish"
- To turn in a blackboard assignment do the following:
  - The exported zip file for your assignment should be uploaded into your blackboard assignment.
  - The contents of the Worksheet should be copied into the "Comments" section of your blackboard assignment.
  - If you have done the first 2 steps successfully, you can hit the blackboard submit button. Note that I normally blackboard will be set up to give you one submission attempt, so make sure this is what you want to submit. If for some reason you need to submit it again, you will need to inform me (normally with an email) to clear your attempt so you can submit it again.
- If you find that you need to work on different computers, I would recommend moving your software using the zip file. Trying to copy an Eclipse workspace from one computer to another is difficult because Eclipse saves a lot of it's settings in the workspace. On the other hand, I would recommend sending your zipped up project to yourself using an email attachment. I will demo taking a zip file and recreating the Eclipse project. It consists of the following basic steps:
  - Unzip the zip file. On a PC, this is a right-click and pick "Extract All". On a Mac, you can double click the zip file.
  - When you create a new project, uncheck the box labeled: "Use default location" and Browse to where your unzipped folder is. Navigate to the folder just above the "src" directory.
  - Click Finish and your project should be ready to go in Eclipse. Note that the changes you make in Eclipse at this point will be in the Unzipped folder .... not in the normal Eclipse workspace.

JING - a better way to communicate

After you have settled into this course, it will be recommended that you get acquanted with a free online tool call JING for making ad-hoc videos of your screen along with the potential of recording your voice comments.

Details of setting up JING will be provided later in the course.

With JING, you will be able to ask your question by showing your problem with a short video of your screen. JING will be an option for introductory courses like cps161 and cps171 to provide better discussion board entries for class participation.

JING will be mandatory for the more advanced courses such as cps261, cps278, cps251, etc. In this case, JING will provide a clean way to demonstrate your homework and projects.

By the way to record voice you need a voice input device on your computer (most laptops come with them). I really would like your JINGs to include voice, because without recorded voice it is sometimes hard to know what is going on.

August 6, 2015 1:04 PM